I'm trying to figure out how to improve my backlink strategy and I have come across suggestions to place comments and sig files in other relevant sites. My question is,is it neccessary for the links that i have inserted on other blogs or sites to be clicked and followed by a reader to be able to gain rankings? If the links are not followed, are they useless? If they are not, does that mean that i can create a hundred or more links for the sake of building links to my site?

I think you're misunderstanding what people mean by followed and not followed links.

In your browser, if you click on View/Source and look in the HTML of a page, you'll find that many links on blogs and forums are what people call "no-followed". In such such cases you'll find the following code inside the link...

These no-followed links do not pass PageRank. So they are useful only for branding and for direct traffic - if people click on them and visit your site.

Google introduced no-followed links to allow blog and website owners to indicate links which they don't trust. The other main search engines agreed to do the same. Then Google broadened the rules by insisting that website owners should also no-follow ads they sell on their websites.

If you want find blogs they DO pass PageRank, do a Google search for dofollow or do follow or do-follow blogs. You should be able to find lists of them.

But I was not referring to the code. I was merely wondering if it will matter if the links are clicked or not. Will it improve my traffic even if the links are not followed? Is the mere quantity of backlinks boost my rank whether they are clicked or not?

Some of the most valuable links are the ones you get when someone likes something you've written and voluntarily links to it from within an article on a related topic. These have the advantage of looking very natural to the search engines, but they're also wonderful for anyone reading the article because they see a genuine, personal recommendation and therefore arrive at your site in a positive, receptive mood.

If the site linking to you is an "authority" site and has thousands of sites - including high quality sites - linking to it, then you're getting a really good link.

So, the more good content you make naturally as time passes creates quality links which in turn boosts rankings, right? Especially, like you said, if it came from authority sites. Well, how i wish everyone will have the patience to wait for those links to mature in number but only a few do it and resort to unorganic ways to multiply their links. So does it really matter if you do it the long or quick way? You will still earn your stars because of the quantity of the links, right?

I just got hired by someone who plans to make 1,000 blogs linking back to his money site. The articles are terrible but the main site is ok. He told me not to bother editing the articles. He was more concerned with the link juice back to his site. Is he going to make money with this kind of stuff?

informer wrote:So does it really matter if you do it the long or quick way? You will still earn your stars because of the quantity of the links, right?

I think you'll discover that the QUALITY of the links is much more important than the number.

I just got hired by someone who plans to make 1,000 blogs linking back to his money site ... Is he going to make money with this kind of stuff?

Perhaps. I wouldn't bet on it.

Basically, his strategy is to try to outsmart Google and the other search engines. Considering all the VERY smart people who work for Google, this sounds like a risky strategy to me.

Imagine you were a search engine engineer designing a search engine which takes into account links to websites. Surely one of the first things you would try to look for would be artificial linking structures involving a large number of low quality sites.

I'd design a search engine so that the easier a link was to get, the less influence I'd give it. The more the link looked like a genuine recommendation from a related site, the more power I'd give it.

Search engines are getting smarter and smarter all the time. Why try to fight that? It makes more sense to work with them, I reckon.

Google says it now looks at more than 200 factors when it ranks sites. It knows things like how long people stay on a site, how many pages they visit, how many high quality sites link to it, etc. So if you have a link-building strategy which takes into account only 2 or 3 of those 200 things, then perhaps it will work today - if you're lucky. But what about tomorrow?

Picture those 1,000 low-quality blogs. Who would link to them? Only people who also create low-quality sites. So it should be easy for Google to spot that they belong to a junky neighborhood.

The strategy seems awfully shortsighted to me.

I'd rather aim to design a site and a link-getting strategy that is still working well 10 or 20 years from now. Think of your site's potential revenue over all those years.

As affiliate marketing gets more and more intensely competitive, the affiliates who rise to the top and do really well will be the ones who build sites that genuinely add value to the Internet. I'm willing to bet my money on that. In fact, that's exactly what our business is doing.

I guess the saying is true in internet marketing.
"Build it (the organic way)and they will come". Hmmm, perhaps using some tools and web 2.0 strategies to improve the number of backlinks will not hurt, right?

I'm trying to figure out how to improve my backlink strategy and I have come across suggestions to place comments and sig files in other relevant sites. My question is,is it neccessary for the links that i have inserted on other blogs or sites to be clicked and followed by a reader to be able to gain rankings? If the links are not followed, are they useless? If they are not, does that mean that i can create a hundred or more links for the sake of building links to my site?

The more high PR links you have will let your page climb to the top of Google's search results for that particular keyword. Also, links from the same niche will give good impression to search engines.

On the other hand, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) requires no PR. They are well-focused on popularity. That means the more links you have from outside, the more popular your page will be and that will let your site be seen on the first page of these search engines.

Having lots of backlinks like social bookmarking and article submissions can really speed up your indexing on all search engines.

Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website.

Backlinking is a way of getting that needed traffic to your site and you have to do it correctly and smartly. A great way to achieve visits is by linking to other similar or related sites to yours. It is also considered to be the best way of increasing website traffic and most importantly increasing the page rank (search engine value) of a website/blog.